Maynard James Keenan revealed he’d been hospitalized with a second attack of coronavirus while he was still recovering from the effects of the first.

The Tool frontman had fallen ill in February 2020, reporting that he was “still dealing with the residual effects” in October and, although he’d survived, “it wasn’t pretty.”

In a new interview on The Strombo Show, he said he was infected again in mid-November and “ended up in the ER on Dec. 1.” He added that the attack was “ugly” and he was unable to breathe.

“I could barely put two words together without going into a coughing fit,” Keenan, 56, said. “It ended up kind of also progressing into pneumonia. So, if I stayed in the hospital, they said, ‘Okay, we can keep you here, but you're fighting 12 other people for a bed and a ventilator we don't have, so what do you want to do?’ I'm like, ‘Well, I need to breathe and I need to sleep.’”

He added: “So, you're just treating symptoms at that point. There's nothing you can do other than treat the symptom … [use] a real cough medicine, not the crap over the counter, and then, like, an inhaler, and some antibiotics to fight the pneumonia, and strap the fuck in.”

To date, more than 27 million cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed in the U.S., with 461,930 deaths and 16.9 million recoveries. A total of 105 million cases have been reported worldwide, with 2.3 million deaths and 77.7 million recoveries. Figures say around two percent of the American population has received the recommended double dose of vaccine, with more than eight percent receiving at least one dose.

 

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